WATCH: Savannah Guthrie Confronts Kushner For Saying We Were ‘On the Other Side’ of Pandemic in April — 130,000 Deaths Ago
Today Show host Savannah Guthrie confronted First Son-in-Law Jared Kushner for declaring, in April, that “We’re on the other side of the medical aspect of this” coronavirus pandemic, and pointed out that over 130,000 Americans have died since then.
On Tuesday morning’s edition of the NBC morning show, Guthrie played a clip from an April 29th appearance on Fox & Friends in which Kushner said “We’re on the other side of the medical aspect of this. I think we’ve achieved all the different milestones that are needed. So the federal government rose to the challenge and this is a great success story.”
“You talk about hysteria. On the day you said that, Jared, there were 61,000 deaths,” Guthrie said. “Today there are 190,000 deaths. Subsequent to that, Arizona, Texas, Florida had major outbreaks. How do you explain that kind of statement in light of what’s happened?”
Kushner claimed he was referring to what he called the “crisis phase” of the pandemic, and talked about overcoming shortages of medical supplies.
“But it wasn’t a success story on April 29th, right? That was premature to say that.” Guthrie asked.
“No, again, I think we’ve risen to a lot of the challenges,” Kushner replied, then delivered a lengthy response that concluded with the words “This is an unprecedented challenge. and the president rose to that challenge.”
During that April 29th appearance on Fox, Kushner promised “We will make sure that we get enough tests into the market that we can responsibly test people,” and claimed “The data is on our side and President Trump has created a pathway to safely open up our country.”
He also bragged that “We’ve done more tests than any other country in the world so we’ve got to be doing a lot of things right.”
His claim that we were “on the other side” was in response to Brian Kilmeade’s question about the administration’s shuttering of the White House pandemic office.
The University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation coronavirus model — which is used by the White House task force — currently predicts that 410,000 Americans will have died from the pandemic by the end of the year.
Watch the clip above via NBC.
